Reflecting the City of Wood
The Chiayi Art Museum (CAM) is located on a triangular city block formed by Zhongshan Road, Guangning Street and Lanjing Street.
There are three structures on the site. One is the former Chiayi branch of the Monopoly Bureau of the Japanese colonial government, built in 1936 and today listed as a municipal historic site; another is an alcohol warehouse built in 1954; and the third is a warehouse for alcohol and tobacco products, rebuilt in the 1980s. The architectural team responsible for renovating these into the CAM, which included Huang Ming-wei and Wang Ming-hsien, had the clever idea of placing a triangular glass structure on the grounds to link together these three buildings from different eras.
The designer of the Monopoly Bureau office building was the Japanese architect Sutejiro Umezawa. Born in Ishikawa Prefecture, Umezawa came to Taiwan to take a job in 1911, leaving the island only in 1955. He gave the best years of his life to Taiwan, and left a lifetime of works behind him, including the Songshan Tobacco Factory of the Monopoly Bureau (today the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park), the Hayashi Department Store in Tainan, and the offices and dormitory of the Tainan Police Agency (today Tainan Art Museum Building 1), all buildings from the era of Japanese rule.
“This building [the Chiayi branch of the Monopoly Bureau] can be considered an example of eclecticism, marking a transitional period between classical and modern styles,” explains Huang Ming-wei. The locations of the entryway lobby and the interior stairwells go against the classical emphasis on centrality and symmetry, offering a thought-provoking additional element of interest.
One of the main focal points of the renovation work was the new façade. The structure of the alcohol and tobacco products warehouse was not earthquake-resistant enough, so the architects tore down the concrete outer wall and replaced it with cross-laminated timber. On the one hand this made the structure lighter, improving its seismic resistance, while at the same time the wood makes the interior space warmer in winter and cooler in summer, meeting the current demand for energy-saving buildings with lower carbon emissions. “Another reason we used a great deal of wood was that we hoped to draw a connection to the flourishing wood industry in Chiayi back in the era when it was called the City of Wood,” says Wang Ming-hsien. At another corner, the architects deliberately created a curved wall shape to echo the curved corner of the historic building, which is a nod of respect from the modern-day architects to their Japanese predecessor.
This drawing shows how the addition of a triangular space has linked together three previously unconnected buildings from different eras to form the Chiayi Art Museum.